How to Visualize Another Person: Summary of a Class Presentation

Visualize Other People

Please excuse the quick sketch I’ve posted here (click on the link above—that says “Visualize other people”—to open it). This is my attempt to put in rough picture form what I was talking about in the class the other day. There are three key parts:

1. The Son of God in Heaven: this is the actual person you are in communication with. This is the person as they really are—their unfiltered version. This person is best pictured as a vast light, with Great Rays streaming from this light to infinity.
2. The thought system: this is the system of beliefs and traits the person identifies with.
3. The body: this, of course, is the form you see when you look on someone. It is the projection of their thought system, and in particular of their self-concept.

The overall concept is that as the person (#1) identifies with the thought system (#2), it’s as if most of who they are is filtered out. And then as the body (#3) appears and they experience themselves as living inside that, even more of who they are is filtered out. As a result, what we see of a person represents a double filtering of who they are. The person as they really are is unfiltered, but the person as we experience them, and as they experience themselves, is the massively filtered version. Because who they are is best pictured as a vast light, we can imagine the rays of that light passing through one dark filter and then another, so that only the weakest, murkiest light makes it through into this world.

Our job is to not get tricked into taking the “measly trickle” (as Aldous Huxley put it) that comes out of the filter as being who the person is. We need to look past the body, in recognition of its valuelessness. And we need to also look past the thought system/personality. Even as we acknowledge the body’s behavior and deal with the personality, our mind’s eye is constantly looking past them to the unfiltered light of who the person really is. That’s who we are relating with, and that’s who we are emotionally responding to.